Cinema Asian America – May Highlights

To celebrate Asian Pacific American Heritage Month this month, Cinema Asian America presents its largest and most ambitious offering of films to date. In collaboration with the Center for Asian American Media (CAAM), nearly two dozen Asian American films are available to watch for free with XFINITY On Demand™ through the end of the month. Included in this lineup are many seminal works from the canon that are rarely available to the public such as Steven Okazaki’s Academy-Award winning documentary “Days of Waiting” – a portrait of Estelle Ishigo, one of few Caucasians interned with Japanese Americans during WWII, and Nicole Newnham and David Grabias’s “Sentenced Home,” which follows three Cambodian American men, who are caught in the tangle of post 9/11 policy shifts and are deported from their lives and families in the US for past transgressions they have already paid the price for. Also highlighted are the premieres of two new web series: Bao Ngyuen’s “Employed Identity” which explores the lives of Vietnamese American artists working in Vietnam, and Karen Lin’s “Hungry Monster,” a family-friend exploration of Asian comfort foods.

In this month’s New Releases we find Mona Lisa Yuchengco’s intimate portrait of legendary Filipino filmmaker Marilou Diaz Abaya, “Filmmaker on a Voyage” as well as two new works from the Philippines – Quark Henare’s chronicle of youthful misadventures in the underground Manila music scene, “Rakenroll,” and Marlon Rivera’s “Ang Huling Henya” an international agent is charged with stopping a mad men from creating an army of zombies! Finally, in “Action and Intrigue” we feature Keanu Reeves in the samurai vengeance film “47 Ronin” and the Bollywood crime action film “Dishkiyaoon” starring Sunny Deol, Harman Baweja and Ayesha Khanna as individuals seeking meaning in life while trapped in the cold loneliness of a gangster underworld.